St. Louis Blues’ Ivan Barbashev (49) controls the puck over Minnesota Wild’s Jonas Brodin (25) during the second period of Game 2 of an NHL hockey first-round playoff series Friday, April 14, 2017, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Stacy Bengs)

The St. Louis Blues are in the Wild’s heads. They are in there dancing with the little squirrels and causing havoc. That does not bode well for the home team.

The Blues are no match for the Wild on the ice. The difference in talent levels is obvious. So they are resorting to other tactics. The Blues are attacking them psychologically. The Wild long have had a reputation for having a fragile psyche.

We thought we were done with that upon Bruce Boudreau’s arrival. But the team’s March swoon brought back a lot of bad memories. Frustrated by their inability to score during that month, they rolled their eyes and howled at the moon as the losses mounted. The more they tried to reason things out, the less they put the biscuit in the basket.

With the Wild, momentum is like a giant boulder rolling down a hill. That’s both when things are going well and when things are going poorly. What the Blues needed to do, to have any chance at all in this series, was get into the Wild’s heads and just sort of root around in there and cause trouble.

Mission accomplished.

The Blues hang around, hang around, hang around and then sneak in the winning goal at the end. And the Yeobots are defending like crazy, especially their gigantic defensemen, who have turned the slot area in front of Jake Allen into a vast wasteland. It’s more than frustrating.

In two home losses, the Wild have scored two goals, neither of them at even strength. And you could see the question marks hanging over their heads as they left the building Friday evening.

“It’s obviously not the way we wanted to start,” Ryan Suter said. “We’ve got to score goals. Obviously, it’s just a bad feeling right now.”

“It will be nice to get on the road, get away from the distractions at home,” Chris Stewart said as the team prepared to head to St. Louis. “A little team bonding. A couple of nice dinners. Boys time.”

Well, you work all year for home-ice advantage, and then getting out of town suddenly seems like a lovely option. It’s just very messy for the Wild right now.

The boulder is in motion. St. Louis has done exactly what it should: Hang in there until something good happens. The Wild had a ton of chances, especially in the first period, on Friday. They could not finish any of them. Their only score was while on a five-on-three power play.

“As tough as it is to get through the slot and everything, I’d say we had more chances to score than they did tonight,” Boudreau said.

That and nine bucks will get you a beer at Xcel.

“We were a great five-on-five team during the regular season,” Charlie Coyle said. “We’ve just got o translate that over.”

No one expected this much playoff misery this quickly. Twice, now, Allen and the Yeobots have frustrated Wild shooters. It was more pronounced in Game 1, during which the Wild peppered Allen with 52 shots – although most were from bad angles.

Mike Yeo’s team attempted to ramp up its own offense on Friday. And the two goals it mustered were just enough. The Wild are so frustrated that they are attempting to play a roughhouse style during stretches. That had Boudreau scratching his head behind the bunch because, as he noted, the team “hadn’t done that over 82 games.” So why now?

Boudreau was neither spitting fire nor throwing his players under the bus afterward.

“Let’s face it, both games could have gone either way,” he reasoned. “I don’t see why we can’t go in there and do to them what they did to us. It’s not impossible.”

He’s absolutely right. These rolling boulders are funny things. They can turn on a dime and move in a different direction. But first he needs to divert it from its current path. He said he will look at the game tapes, find where the scoring chances came from, and then attempt to get his players to create more of them.

“We’re just missing by a hair,” he said.

The Wild can win two straight in St. Louis. Again, they are more talented. Physically, at least. They’ll need to right their fragile psyche by getting a couple past Allen early in Game 3. The old swagger will return. Their heads will clear. They will grab this series by the throat and take over.

Or else.

“This series is far from over,” Stewart said. “There’s no quit in this room.”

No quit, but plenty of frustration. Enough to keep the boulder rolling. I guess we’ll see what they are really made of pretty quickly.

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